At Oil Analysis Laboratories, our priority is always to provide the best possible service to our customers. Therefore, we like to take the time at the end of the year to review what we have achieved over the past twelve months and to set goals on how we can improve over the coming year. If you read our review blog last year, you may remember that I discussed the challenges that seemed to face most businesses regardless of industry. These challenges still stand true now and, in many cases, have worsened as the UK stands on the precipice of a coming recession. In times of economic crisis, companies will obviously tighten their budgets dramatically and avoid unnecessary spending. However, you may be surprised to learn that during recessions, the oil analysis industry sees money spent on its services go up massively. As our motto says, ‘for when failure is not an option’. Money needs to be spent wisely during this time, and the wisest thing your business may be able to do is to invest in ensuring your equipment is running at peak performance and not subject to an avoidable failure. We have seen some examples of customers cutting back on their oil analysis during the 2008 financial crash, and it never ended well. Sadly, I have personally seen companies that were just treading water finally end up going out of business with the final straw being unable to pay the repair and replacement costs due to a massive failure that oil analysis could have predicted, and prevented.
If your business can’t afford to fail, then you can’t afford not to invest in the best oil analysis.
At the laboratory, we don’t just issue out advice, we take it too. Therefore, we have continued to invest money back in to improving our service and will continue to do so over the coming year.
In summary, this year we have:
- Invested in equipment such as dielectric breakdown, resistivity and a dissolved gas analyser so that we now have a fully operational transformer and turbine laboratory test suites. This has allowed us to bring in customers from new industries to Oil Analysis Laboratories.
- Begun rolling out our new courier service, LubeWear Swift, which provides customers with a range of new and convenient options on how to send their samples to the lab.
- Have been featured in two magazines; Auto Technician and Car Mechanic.
- Made investments and improvements to our fuel testing suite. We can now perform full culture microbiology investigations and further expansion will be coming early in the New Year (see below).
- Upgraded the offering of our coolant test suite; specific gravity, pH and boiling point testing now come as standard at no extra cost to customers, just because we think this helps the diagnostician give our customers a more informed diagnosis to our customers.
Going forward to 2023, some of our current improvement plans are:
- The continued improvement of our fuel testing suite, so we will soon be offering calorific value and filter blocking tendency.
- Improving our backup power supply to ensure the laboratory can continue running fully in cases of electricity outages
- Investing in a second resistivity instrument to increase our testing capacity and backup options when serving some of the most critical industries.
- Later in the year, we have a special and exciting expansion planned that we can’t reveal just yet, so watch this space!
Our success depends on that of our customers, and we will carry on supporting all who work with us in whatever ways we can. If you have any suggestions for ways we can improve and help you better, our doors (and email inboxes) are always open.
Like last year, our New Year’s resolution remains to be to provide the best service for all our customers, new and old, because we understand that for you, failure is not an option!
Happy New Year from all the team at OAL.